Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

There is a great effervescence in the world today of group politics and group movements. This historical trend creates two characteristic dilemmas. The first dilemma has to do with the problem of incorporation. For a marginal group, the struggle for greater power, privilege or autonomy, typically takes the form of a quest for incorporation into the existing social order. This struggle for incorporation seems to propel the group in an inherently conservative direction. The strategy is conservative both in its attitude toward existing social arrangements and in the distributive consequences which typically follow the struggle for group preferment. Benefits generated by the strategy are disproportionately captured by elites within the group-by corporate and professional elites best able to capture and deploy the instruments of group preferment.

The second dilemma associated with the rise of group politics stems from the tension between the defense of group interests and the debate over institutional alternatives. The two perspectives seem, at first, to be mutually incompatible. In the first setting, group interests are paramount, but to the exclusion of an institutional program. In the second case, institutional criticism and analysis receive pride of place, but group interests are either smothered or submerged beneath the weight of the institutional discussion.

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